Tim Keane reviews the exhibition Yvonne Jacquette: The High Life at DC Moore Gallery, New York, on view through February 8, 2014.

Keane writes: "The longer the visitor stands before these landscapes, the more it becomes clear that their realistically represented subjects are subordinate to their finely painted detailing and decentered arrangements. Like the painter working from her window in the sky, the viewer, virtually hypnotized by the city’s precise hues and resonant tones, becomes lost in the grids of color far below, and steps, as it were, into competing sensations of ascension, suspension, and compression… Jacquette’s paintings do not accrue meaning from a visual narrative that develops between human bodies and the natural and civic surroundings. Her works’ cohesiveness and significance are the result of complicated, semi-abstract color fields, a concise and meticulous kind of pointillism, and the manner in which each of her paintings dramatizes the predominance of organic forces over the artificial."